TL;DR: Anthropic refused to sign a contract with the Pentagon that would have allowed the U.S. military to use all of its models without restrictions. Anthropic insisted on an exception, and brace yourself, that its models cannot be used: 1) for mass surveillance of citizens, 2) for autonomous killing. Now the administration is threatening that if the founder of Anthropic doesn't change his mind by a certain date, they will come after him.
Google, OpenAI, and Musk (Grok) have all signed the contract.
Following Sam Altman's announcement over the past few hours, people have been speaking out massively about cancelling their OpenAI subscriptions and subscribing to Claude.
New AI models pop up every week. Some developer tools like @Cursor, @Zed, and @Kilo Code let you choose between different models, while more opinionated products like @Amp and @Tonkotsu default to 1 model.
Curious what the community recommends for coding tasks? Any preferences?
That's a lot of AGI, with some substantial firepower:
Anthropic has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.
From Coatue, who lead the round:
...what s changed since three months ago (the last round was only three months ago, believe it or not)?
Three things:
We ve seen the shift from co-pilots that help make us more efficient to agents actually doing long-form work tasks on our behalf. This has meant an explosion in both productivity and ROI for customers.
Anthropic introduced Mythos Preview, a whole new model class that demonstrates a step change in intelligence level as seen in the METR chart below. It not only shows dramatic improvement to coding and long-running agents, it is also defining a new frontier for security.
And finally > use cases spreading from coding to everything else.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 today, and it's a bit different from the usual model bump.
It's not a bigger Opus - it's a new tier above Opus, built on the same underlying model as Mythos, the one Anthropic had locked behind a government cybersecurity program since April.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 yesterday, and from the announcement it looks like a solid upgrade over 4.7. Here s what stood out to me:
Better judgment on agentic tasks early testers say it catches its own mistakes, pushes back on bad plans, and flags uncertainties instead of bulldozing through
~4x less likely to let code flaws pass unremarked compared to Opus 4.7
Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code can now orchestrate hundreds of parallel subagents for codebase-scale migrations
Effort control you can now choose how hard the model thinks on each response (from fast/light to max effort)
Fast mode is 3x cheaper than it was for previous models
Same pricing as Opus 4.7: $5/M input, $25/M output
A couple weeks ago, Boris Cherny (the creator of Claude Code) shared a bunch of really useful tips on getting the most out of Claude Code. #1 at the top of the list: do more in parallel. He himself runs 10-15 Claude codes in parallel.
His advice and practice makes sense: coding agents give us the ability scale infinitely. At this point, the only real limiter is our own ability to manage all of these agents.
Cowork turns Claude into a real coworker. Give it access to a folder on your computer and assign tasks instead of chatting. Claude can read, edit, and create files, plan its work, and execute tasks end-to-end while keeping you in control. Less back-and-forth, more work done.
I like Claude Code a lot, but one thing still feels weirdly opaque to me: token burn while you are deep in a session.
When I am iterating fast, the bill usually shows up after the fact. By then I already made the expensive choices. Long context, repeated retries, and bouncing between models can get surprisingly costly before you really notice it.
